Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

“It’s cruel after years of thinking him dead to find out he was alive on Wednesday, in a place I go to, but now is truly dead.” Her lip trembled and she looked away.

“He just disappeared?”

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak for a moment. “One day he left the house for school and never came back. No note, no indication he was going. He took nothing with him. He just ceased to exist, or so it seemed. The police searched, my parents hired private investigators. My father, taking the worst thing he could think of, suspected the Moonies. But not one single trace was found.”

“On his way to school?”

“Chicago. He was an economics major.”

“How awful.”

“I don’t know how my parents bore up under this. My mother of course never lets herself go physically, but inside she has been devastated. It is the first time my father confronted something he couldn’t do anything effective about. That shook him almost as much as the loss of Michael.”

“Mr. Rush says your mother is very devout.”

“Let me show you something.”

They went rapidly through the house, which was far larger than Kim’s first impression of it. On an upper floor as they came down a hallway stood a small altar. There was a statue of perhaps three feet in height of Our Blessed Lady and a very large candle in a wrought-iron holder burning before it. Janet turned and widened her eyes significantly as she indicated the shrine.

“Mother’s. For the return of her lost son.”

There was nothing to say to that. Janet went into a room and waited for Kim to join her.

“This is just the way it was when he disappeared. Michael’s room. Maybe now Mother will agree to...”

No need to develop the thought. No doubt Mrs. Layton would consider it an irreverence to get rid of her son’s clothes and other effects, even though she knew now he was dead. A computer stood on the desk, covered with a clear plastic hood. A bookshelf the top row of which contained works in or related to economics. The other shelves were a hodgepodge, largely paperbacks — mysteries, westerns, science fiction, classics. Michael Layton had either unsettled literary tastes or universal interests.

“The police checked over this room and the private investigators Daddy hired also looked it over. They found no indication Mike intended to leave, and of course that introduced a note of hope. That he’d been kidnapped, for instance. But no demands were made. Every investigation left us where we’d been — with something that made utterly no sense.”

“It must have been awful.”

“I am glad the waiting is over, after all these years. Does that sound terrible?”

“No.”

“I wanted you to see this. I wanted you to know that there are no clues here.”

Kim smiled. “You’ve heard of Sister Mary Teresa?”

Janet nodded.

As they went downstairs, Kim reflected that if Janet was right, and why wouldn’t she be, the explanation for Michael Layton’s murder would have to be sought in what he had been doing in the years since he left his home for the last time. And no one seemed to know where on earth he had been.

5

“Miss Butterfingers is going to call on us,” Joyce whispered when Kim returned to Walton Street.

“Wow.”

“Just what I said to Emtee Dempsey.”

“Yes,” Sister Mary Teresa said, when Kim went into the study and asked about the impending visit. “Miss Fastnekker called half an hour ago and asked if she might come by. I am trying to read these articles of Katherine’s before our visitor arrives. Here are the ones I’ve read.”

Kim took the photocopies and began to read them as she crossed to a chair. What a delight they were. This was Katherine at the height of her powers, the woman who had been the queen of Chicago journalism longer than it was polite to mention. Reading those old stories acquainted Kim with the kind of person she preferred not to know. The Regina Fastnekker Katherine had interviewed intensively and written about with rare evocative power was a prophet of doom, an angel of destruction, a righteous scourge of mankind. At twenty-two years old, she had concluded that human beings are hopelessly corrupt, there is nothing to redeem what is laughingly called civilization. Any judgment that what she had done was illegal or immoral proceeded from a system so corrupt as to render the charges comic. Katherine described Regina as a nihilist, one who preferred nothing to everything that was. It was not that the world had this or that flaw, the world was the flaw.

“I am glad you don’t have possession of hydrogen weapons,” Katherine had observed.

“Atomic destruction is the solution. Inevitably one day it will arrive. I have been anticipating that awful self-judgment of mankind on itself by the actions I have taken.”

“Who appointed you to this destructive task?”

“I did.”

“Have you ever doubted your judgment?”

“Not on these matters.”

“From the point of view of society, it makes sense to lock you up, wouldn’t you say?”

“Society will regret what has been done to me.”